Lately, I’ve been down in the dumps, in a funk, struggling to get back to a sense of normalcy. I’m exhausted when I wake up. I’m downing coffee by the gallon just to get through the morning and I’d trade my right eye for a nap after lunch. Does this sound familiar?
Fatigue and Your Workout
It can be hard to get up and work out when you wake up fatigued and desperately wanting another hour of sleep. After all, if you get up at 5 a.m. to work out for an hour before showering, getting ready for work or getting the kids ready for school or both. You may feel like you’ve done a marathon before you’ve even dropped the kids off at school.
Sleep is important and we’ve talked about being well rested, but your workout provides your body with an energy boost that may surprise you. I’ve had those dragging days, days when I could cheerfully have shut the alarm off and rolled back over. But inevitably, when I’ve done that, I’ve regretted it.
Building Blocks
Your body receives energy from different sources. One source, of course, is food. Our food is fuel that provides the body with carbs, proteins and fats. All of these are processed, utilized or stored. Sleep is another source of energy. We ‘recharge’ as it were when we sleep. Our minds process and store information as well as converting short-term to long-term memory while we are sleeping. So, if food is our fuel and sleep is our recharge – what is exercise?
It’s an action that produces an equal and opposite reaction. You think that when you workout you’ll just get more tired because you are exerting a lot of energy, but what happens is that your body reacts to this energy output by – yes you guessed it – producing more energy. It reaches into the storage and starts the output.
Don’t Skip Your Workout
Yes, you need rest and you need to eat, but you need to exercise too. Your body and your mind will be charged and ready to go and you may just surprise yourself with how much extra energy you end up having.